Christina Applegate recalls ‘first sign of MS’ while filming Dead to Me pilot

Christina Applegate has reflected on the very first sign she had multiple sclerosis (MS).

The Anchorman actor, 53, was diagnosed with the chronic nervous system disorder in 2021, though had experienced symptoms for years before this.

She has now revealed she unknowingly experienced one of her first symptoms of MS while filming the pilot for her Netflix black comedy Dead to Me, which ran for three seasons on the streamer from 2019 to 2022.

“I remember falling that day. Hi, first sign of MS!” she said to the show’s creator Liz Feldman on Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s MeSsy podcast, recalling a sequence in which her character Jen was running across a field.

Feldman said: “I remember you losing your balance a couple of times but it was very hard to figure out. I remember one time it was like really late at night, we’d been shooting probably 14 or 15 hours, it seemed completely reasonable that anybody would be collapsing.”

Speaking about slowly realising Applegate had a condition, Feldman added: “There’s no handbook for this. I could just sense that A, she was scared and B, that something was wrong, something in her body was not working the way that she wanted it to. I told her so many times that it’s just a TV show; we’re making a TV show and it’s so silly, you know, at the end of the day!

“I knew Christina well enough to know that something major had to be going on because she’s an extreme professional.”

Adaptations were made on set for the final season of Dead to Me, as Applegate’s condition declined. For example, sound technician and longtime friend Mitch B Cohn held up the actor’s legs as she filmed certain scenes. In others, she entered rooms with doors onscreen first, so she could lean on them to stand.

“That would not happen anywhere else,” said the star. “So my gratitude toward you guys being humans – because you should be humans and love other humans – I can’t even tell you, that’s not the normal reaction!”

Applegate has said that she is “probably not going to work on-camera again”, but would be open to voice work.

On the NHS website, MS is described as “a condition that affects the brain and spinal cord. It cannot currently be cured, but treatment can often help manage it.”

Symptoms can include extreme tiredness, vision problems, numbness in parts of the body, being off-balance or dizzy, muscle cramps and spasms, urination issues, memory problems, and sexual dysfunction.